Sunday, March 30, 2014

So I got into it with the clueless @studentactivism over #CancelColbert and then Mikki Kendall got involved somehow, and lied about me some more.

If you Google my name, you will see Kendall's smear about me show up at the top of the search results, on her Esoterica Tumblr account where she blogs under the name Karnythia.

Initially I thought that someone named Rebecca Scott, the Mad Gastronomer was the original source of the smear, but in fact Kendall's Tumblr account was the actual source of the Google-results smear. Not that Rebecca Scott was sorry for helping to spread the lie any more than Kendall is - when I contacted Scott privately she simply doubled-down and repeated the smear some more.

Unlike Mikki Kendall, I am easy to contact. My email address is right on this web site. So if my claim that Mikki Kendall is responsible for smears against my name was a mistake, why didn't she contact me directly and say so?

But of course no matter who started it, Mikki Kendall is responsible because it's her Tumblr account that appears at the top of the search results. All she has to do is take down that post. But she won't do that, and she won't apologize. She'll just keep lying. Shamelessly.

The important thing to be aware of though, is that although this started as a personal attack by Mikki Kendall against me, it's more than that now, because thanks to Kendall I've become aware of the pernicious evil that is the SJW movement - although I didn't have a name for it until I found Will Shetterly's site.

I should note that Shetterly and I don't agree about everything - we recently had an argument on his site about rape culture "hysteria." But I think it should be possible to disagree about something - like in my case, the disagreement with Mikki Kendall and friends on whether Lennon/Ono were/are racists - without having your name smeared via the Google-bombing power of Tumblr blog aggregation.

Clearly Kendall disagrees - she feels she is blameless in her deliberate smearing of my name. But as I've found out, Kendall is by no means alone, and it isn't really personal against me - I'm a white feminist and that's why I was a target. Just as Sarah Kendzior had no qualms about smearing Katha Pollitt - and that is exactly the term Pollitt used in her rebuttal, "smear."

It is absurd to compare me to a dictator or the Saudi regime. Two people can have different problems with the same thing. But that idea is too subtle for Sarah Kendzior, who prefers wild potshots and smears.

So it isn't only Mikki Kendall. There is an entire loosely-connected, semi-anonymous, poorly-vetted group who used to mainly congregate on Tumblr but have mostly migrated onto Twitter, who are purveyors of wild potshots and smears. Kendall, thanks to her self-publicity talents and ethics-free attacks on people based on skin color and gender, is one of the most prominent.

It's one thing to attack a nobody like me, but once your gang starts smearing Katha Pollitt shit is going to get real. Pollitt is a feminist icon and a personal hero of mine (even though we, too, have had a few very minor disgreements) for many years. She's a brilliant writer with a stellar career. And these Social Justice Warrior punks are going to attack her? Not without push-back. Not on my watch.

And once you have seen evidence that members of a SJW group praise rightwingers like Michelle Malkin while attacking progressive feminists like Katha Pollitt you have to start wondering - which side are they really on?

And that's why it's important to keep tabs on these ethics-free mobbers, who seem to attack liberals and progressives with much more ferocity than rightwing pundits or Fox News. And since Mikki Kendall personally dragged me into the SJW war she's the last person who should be whining about it.

Here she is warning @studentactivism about a "target list" I allegedly have:

Although she can't decide whether to refer to me in the singular or plural.

I have news for Kendall - it isn't me who is keeping "a list" - that's here and I have nothing to do with it.

But I will continue to criticize and mock SJWs when they attack me, or other feminists, or create bigotry-inspired hash tags, or create satire-censoring movements out of sheer stupidity. And I have that right - their words are all in the public sphere, self-published.

What's so amusing about Kendall and her gang is their sheer hypocrisy. They can attack people, for any reason, or for no reason, at will, but they whine like poor abused victims if they ever get the tiniest bit of push-back. Just Google Michelle Goldberg, Nation, Kendall if you want to see the shamelessness.

I do like the idea that Kendall is warning her fellow SJWs about being on my imaginary "target list" though - maybe it will make them think twice before smearing random strangers, not to mention important and brilliant feminist writers.

Kendzior will absolutely not hesitate to smear without evidence, as Katha Pollitt discovered, and as can be seen in her claim that Jezebel is out to get non-white people, above.

Jezebel was completely on board Mikki Kendall's bigotry-fest #solidarityisforwhitewomen - which goes to show that if you are perceived as white - or a white organization - you will never be able to please Social Justice Warriors. No matter how much you suck up to them, they will eventually turn against you based on some trumped-up charge - and they won't provide evidence for your guilt either - just their own nutty paranoid unsupported statements.

What Social Justice Warriors really need to do is to start a group - call it Mentally Challenged Americans, who will lobby for the right to be outraged by things you are too stupid to understand.

I mean, look at the utter, flabbergasting false equivalency of the Angus Johnston statement retweeted by Kendzior in the image above: "I'm curious if folks who think Colbert was 100% in the right think the same about Deadspin's use of the word "gook" to describe Suey Park."

It still has not sunk into Angus Johnston's thick thick skull that the folks who think Colbert was in the right do so because what Colbert was doing was satirizing the racism of the Washington Redskins owner. So yes, Colbert was in the right. 100%. Only a fucking idiot - like Angus Johnston, Suey Park, Sarah Kendzior or Michelle Pro-Internment Malkin - would fail to understand that Colbert was 100% right.

But what Angus Johnston believes is that thinking Colbert is right is a sign of racism, and so he has to ask if a racial slur was thought to be just as 100%rightas Colbert's satire of racism.

Truly mind-boggling.

The fact that Social Justice Warriors side with pro-internment Michelle Malkin against liberal satirist Stephen Colbert tells you everything you need to know about just how stupid and utterly useless SJWs are.

It's time for Mentally Challenged Americans! It's time to end the privileging of intelligence in social discourse!

I keep saying that I think Mikki Kendall will one day find a rightwing buddy ala Camille Paglia/Rush Limbaugh, but really, it's hard to believe that the Social Justice Warriors are not already on the Heritage Foundation payroll, in an effort by conservatives to make liberals look like idiots. And it isn't all that far-fetched a conspiracy theory - here we see Suey Park referring to Michelle Malkin as a "reasonable person" - back in January of this year.

Speaking of Kendall, does she support Suey Park? Do you have to even ask? Of course she's also too stupid to get satire:

But then, that's what it means to be a Social Justice Warrior.

So what do the other Social Justice Warriors have to say? Well Flavia Dzodan and Mazzie seem to be quiet on the Colbert front although maybe Mazzie didn't know about the movement to cancel Colbert, but once she reads this post (she reads this site every day - and three times this morning alone - obsessed much? although thankfully for the taxpayers, no longer from her work computer) she might have something to say.

Wednesday, March 26, 2014

Looks as though the Durang play is out, replaced by two Feydeaux. I had to design a new logo, of course, although the general layout of the new site is similar. And I replaced my play THE VERY DARK ROOM with one that is much closer in spirit to the wacky sex farces of Feydeau, called NEW RULES. So much so in fact that one of the Feydeau plays is called THE LADIES MAN and there is a line in NEW RULES in which someone asks: "are you a ladies man or a man's man?" The guy, who is a bisexual, answers "I'm a people person." One of my favorite lines in one of my plays ever. I actually got it from my daughter, whose high school friend Dana had been dating a girl, but then switched to dating a guy. I asked her "is your friend Dana gay or straight or what?" To which my daughter replied: "Dana's a people person." I know a good line when I steal it.

NEW RULES is one of my oldest plays - it was performed in the first Philadelphia Fringe Festival in 1997, at the Old Original Bookbinders restaurant. It was longer then, I condensed it down to ten minutes over the years, as for this 2010 production.

You can listen to the "people person" line in this 2009 reading of NEW RULES. Actor Carl Maguire gave a nice pause before delivering the line, and got a good laugh in response. I also like the lines "3.5 on the Richter Scale. It's the Kinsey Scale you dumbass."

Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Jury duty is finally over! It took almost a month (I first reported for duty on March 2), and I am exhausted.

I'm thinking of writing a play called 12 Angry Jurors from Queens so at least I'll have something out of the experience, because it was not pretty - 12 Angry Men looks like a picnic in comparison to my jury experience.

In "12 Angry Men" there is definitely conflict and jurors insulting each other, and even a moment when Lee J. Cobb attempts to assault Henry Fonda. But for the most part in the movie each juror argues quietly and states their objections clearly to Fonda's not-guilty verdict, and then Fonda argues against them clearly and calmly until he convinces them, one-by-one to change their vote.

In our case, at least 8 out of the 12 jurors, including the jury foreman (and me) yelled at somebody at least once. And nobody changed their vote.

There were actually 10 good people on the jury, and two people who basically sabotaged the entire process. The case was a second-degree murder trial of an African American man. The actual crime happened in October 2008 and it's taken all this time to get to us - and it appears that it was already tried once before.

Early on in the deliberation process nine of us arrived at the conclusion that there was not enough evidence to convict the defendant. There were only two eye-witnesses and their testimony conflicted - one claimed she saw the defendant pull the trigger on the left side of the double-parked car she was in, but the other witness placed the defendant on the right side of the car that the first witness was in, and on the sidewalk, past the line of single-parked cars.

Now it's still possible that the defendant somehow was the killer, but it was very unlikely, and on top of that the first witness contradicted herself. And she was only 17 (back in 2008) when she saw the murder, and she didn't actually identify the defendant until a week after the crime, at a line-up after being shown a mug shot of the defendant.

So although we couldn't say with 100% certainty that the defendant was innocent, there was certainly a reasonable doubt about his guilt. One of the reasons why the movie "12 Angry Men" is so valuable is because Henry Fonda's character helps walk the other jurors through the concept of reasonable doubt.

It's safe to say that the two saboteur jurors have never seen 12 Angry Men. One of the bad jurors, Juror K (I forget everybody's numbers so I'll use their first initial) was an African American woman who basically refused to consider the fact that the two witnesses' testimonies were in conflict - or anything else. She believed the 17-year-old witness (prior to her contradiction) and that was that. She literally said, after several of us asked her to explain why she wouldn't consider other evidence "I'm shutting down now." Which is contrary to the judge's instructions, which were that we were to listen to each others' arguments. So that juror alone was enough to screw the process.

The other juror, whom I'll call Juror D was a real piece of work - a classic Angry White Man who insisted that the majority who voted not guilty had "closed minds." He told me, personally that I was never impartial because I was one of those people who wanted to "help the underprivileged." Which is an echo of some of the jurors in "12 Angry Men" who used the term "bleeding hearts" when jurors voted not guilty.

Juror H, a bright and street-wise young woman, called Juror D a racist to his face. I'm not 100% sure he was a racist - having been falsely tagged as a racist by Mikki Kendall for a stupid reason (I disagreed with friends of her that John Lennon and Yoko Ono were/are racists) I am not so quick to label someone a racist without hard evidence. It's true that Juror D is a science teacher in the Bronx and said many nasty things about his students - for whom, I got the impression, he has nothing but contempt - but I heard nothing specifically racist.

When we all first met I heard Juror D say he was a science teacher. I asked him if he liked Neil DeGrass Tyson and was amazed when he said he'd never heard of Tyson. How could a science teacher not know who Neil DeGrass Tyson is? I said "you know, he's been on the Daily Show" and Juror D said he didn't watch the Daily Show. That's probably when Juror D decided I was a liberal, since I said nothing about politics the entire run of the case.

I strongly suspect Juror D is a fan of Fox News - he didn't come out and say it, but some of the things he said in casual conversation sounded like right-wing talking points.

He also appeared to be homophobic. He told this joke to us:

A guy walks into a bar and says to the bartender, "I just experienced my first blowjob today." "Congratulations," said the bartender, "your next beer is on me." "Thanks" says the guy, "but it's going to take more than one beer to get the taste out of my mouth."

Get it? It's a joke because the idea of a man giving a blowjob is just so wacky it's funny!

It wasn't enough that he was aggressively attacking the other jurors as closed-minded, for no good reason, but as we were discussing the case he would mumble little insults about what we were saying, and kept lecturing us on using evidence instead of emotion to decide the verdict.

Meanwhile it was clear to all of us, by the way he kept referring to the murder victim ("Think of poor Jimmy!") that he wanted somebody to pay for the murder and the guy in custody was just as good as anybody. And he seemed to think that it was his job to solve a mystery. When we pointed out to him that the evidence was not conclusive, he would invent little scenarios to try to make it conclusive - in other words, to do the DA's job all over again.

Thanks to Jurors D and K, we knew early on that this would be a hung jury and by yesterday (Monday) morning sent a letter to the judge saying so. But the judge said we hadn't deliberated long enough and sent us back. It looked like we were in for a looong week of frustration and insults from Juror D.

I should say here that the deliberation process was dragged out more than it should have because Juror D didn't remember important details of the testimony that the rest of us all remembered and so he kept dragging us back into the courtroom to re-listen to the testimony. Which only succeeded in convincing the not-guilty jurors that we were correct in the first place.

This morning there seemed to be a glimmer of hope - Juror L, a pleasant young woman who was leaning towards guilty, initially, was actually listening to our arguments on issues of reasonable doubt and she began to try to talk to Juror D. (Nobody even tried to talk to Juror K after she "shut down.") It appeared that Juror D took this as a betrayal by Juror L and he began to get angry and started talking about how the not-guilty jurors were corrupt because the mother of Juror V lived in a neighborhood near the crime scene. Juror D suggested that Juror V deliberately withheld that information in order to get into the jury and contaminate the jury pool. He indicated he would never change his verdict from guilty ever because of the corruption of the not-guilty jurors.

I told you Juror D was a piece of work.

Well that was enough for me. I was sick of Juror D impugning the not-guilty jurors ethics in general, and mine in particular, and I said we were wasting our time - Juror D was saying he would never budge due to his allegation of "corruption." I said if he felt that way he should complain to the judge about our corruption - that's a serious issue. We all yelled at each other about that for awhile, and the foreman, who was usually a quiet and even-tempered guy, screamed at Juror D about the stupidity of claiming that Juror V was prejudiced because of his mother's neighborhood. Juror M yelled at Juror D that he was "sick of your bullshit."

But Juror D would not budge and so finally Juror D passed a note to the judge asking if he could speak to him.

Well we all went back into the courtroom again and the judge told us that jurors are not allowed to speak directly to the judge. And then, finally, he said we should go back to the deliberation room, write out a statement saying we could not come to a unanimous decision in a timely manner - if that was the case - and send it to him.

So after we went back to the deliberation room, Juror H, Juror S and Juror M and I made one last-ditch effort to argue with Jurors D and K, but it was futile. So we sent the note, were declared a hung jury, and sent home.

On Facebook today somebody posted this essay New York Doesn't Love You which refers to Queens as "the Borough of Misfit Toys." It's certainly a heterogenous place and our jury reflected that. Here is the gender/ethnicity breakdown, including the 4 alternates:

I am so glad it's over although I will miss Gary, the officer of the court assigned to our juror group. I'm not generally interested in cops, but with his salt-and-pepper hair, dimples, dry wit, and somehow Bruce Springsteen-esque demeanor, I had a major crush on Gary. Who is married, of course.

Monday, March 24, 2014

Usually NYCPlaywrights gets maybe one or two unsolicited testimonials to the usefulness of the web site per year, but suddenly we've been averaging one a week. I have no idea why.

My favorite one so far says in part: "the terrific resource you provide out of the goodness of your heart."
As Mae West would say, goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie. But I didn't bother to disillusion the writer - if she doesn't make the connection between Google ads and the site, well whom am I to deny the altruism of NYCPlaywrights?

Sunday, March 23, 2014

Alright, moving along now with the evening of short plays with my buddy Chris Durang. The web site concept is now up.

In other news, my daughter and I will be running in the 5 and 10 K races in May (the week after the show) on Roosevelt Island and we were over there today training. For my first day out I managed to do 5K of jogging and brisk walking. I made all around the island without collapsing - #winning!

Saturday, March 22, 2014

Well it looks like my buddy Tony will be doing a mini-production that will include SODOM & GOMORRAH: THE ONE MAN SHOW, which was first produced four years ago (already!) This production in early May (web site to come soon) is only four performances but it will be nice to take it out and run it again. I think it's a pretty damn tight ten-minute play, although I do intend to tweak it a little. Never hurts to tweak a little. It will be running with a Christopher Durang one-act ('DENTITY CRISIS) as well as another play of mine that's never been produced, THE VERY DARK ROOM. It should be fun.

Here is a brief clip from the 2010 production of S&G. My approach to religion is just as irreverent as Durang's so it should be a good match.

Considering the movie was made by Disney Studios it's no surprise that Walt comes off as a lovable guy - but then, that's why they hired Tom Hanks to play him. They do play fast and loose with the actual sequence of events according to the Wiki about the movie though. But they almost make up for that with a nice little easter egg at the end of the movie - in the main movie Emma Thompson's Travers is shown demanding that her consultation sessions with the Mary Poppins' screenwriter and composers be audio taped, and during the end credits they play an excerpt from the actual Travers taping sessions. Unfortunately that isn't available online as a video clip - you'll have to see the movie.

Travers is portrayed as constantly drinking tea - which really put me in the mood for tea. At one point in the movie her driver, played by Paul Giamatti, gives her tea in a paper cup, which she calls "sacrilege" which I'm inclined to agree with.

ROK aims to usher the return of the masculine man in a world where masculinity is being increasingly punished and shamed in favor of creating an androgynous and politically-correct society that allows women to assert superiority and control over men. Sadly, yesterday’s masculinity is today’s misogyny. The site intends to be a safe space on the web for those men who don’t agree with the direction that Western culture is headed. Click here to send an email to the team.

Women and homosexuals are prohibited from commenting here. They will be immediately banned, and anyone who replies to them will also be banned...

Notice the co-option of the Social Justice Warrior "safe space" concept. And the explicit banning of women and homosexuals.

On viewing the site now, I see the headline articles are "Most Women Don't Deserve a Good Man" and "How to Date Several Girls at the Same Time" and "Stop Being Such a Fucking Faggot."

The fact that such a site would be a huge fan of Mikki Kendall's most well-known message should give any actual feminists serious pause about the "feminism" of Social Justice Warriors.

And again, nobody should be surprised if Mikki Kendall eventually makes public common cause with, or even gets hired by, some rightwing organization. Her campaign of hatred against "white" feminism is music to rightwing ears.

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Since I've been on jury duty for three weeks now (!) counting the days it took for them to pick the jury, I've been thinking of 12 Angry Men, which started life as a live teleplay, then became a movie and a play. All written/adapted by Reginald Rose, whose name I never remember hearing before.

You can watch the definitive version, the 1957 movie starring Henry Fonda (and a young Jack Klugman) and directed by Sidney Lumet for free on Youtube.

It's a tightly-written, excellent piece of work. I will have more to say about it, and the case I'm on, after the case has concluded.

Monday, March 17, 2014

My daughter completed today's NYC Half Marathon - 13.1 miles - very impressive. Although my mother (on left of photo) and I each deserved medals too for braving the frigid temperatures and icy blasts of Arctic air to watch.

Friday, March 14, 2014

Since I've been paying attention to the career of Mikki Kendall (since she Google-bombed my name because I failed to agree with friends of hers that John Lennon and Yoko Ono were racists) I read reports every so often of Kendall's activities prior to 2011 when I first came to know who she was. Apparently there was an incident via Kendall's LiveJournal account.

Karnythia is especially notorious for checking up on a woman who claimed on LJ that her baby had died, going so far as to call up the funeral home to validate the story. There are Gentlefailer discussions about that here, here, and here.

A group of nearly 200 Catholic employers filed a new lawsuit in Oklahoma against the federal government Wednesday, hoping to stop parts of the federal health care law that force them to provide insurance that covers contraceptives.

The recently formed Catholic Benefits Association, which includes archdioceses, an insurance company and a nursing home, takes issue with a compromise in the Affordable Health Care Act offered by the Obama administration that attempted to create a buffer for religiously affiliated hospitals, universities and social service groups that oppose birth control. The law requires insurers or the health plan's outside administrator to pay for birth control coverage and creates a way to reimburse them.

The association says that still forces Roman Catholic employers to violate church teachings.

"Religious liberty encompasses more than the right to worship; it includes the right to freely exercise religion, to allow religion to inform not merely our private beliefs, but also our public actions," the Rev. Paul S. Coakley, archbishop of Oklahoma City.

In other words, it isn't enough for the Catholic Church to prohibit Catholic women from using birth control, the evil men who control the Catholic Church in the United States will do everything in their power, including using the US justice system to try to prevent ALL women from access to birth control.

Here she is quoting my blog post about her, but she doesn't bother to provide a link to the source. That's how your SJW rolls: no ethics, no honor, no shame.

Since I'm not a SJW I responded directly to mazzie (and of course that inevitably includes mazzie's mean girl gang).

I'm not sure what the "mmm bagel" comment is about. Perhaps mazzie is anti-Semitic and thinks I'm Jewish? If I was a SJW I would be all over that chance at smearing mazzie with the charge of "anti-Semitism" - a SJW never ever misses the chance to argue in bad faith.

So deliberately misrepresenting people - arguing in bad faith - is a pillar of the SJW movement. But even more perniciously is the SJW principle of judging everybody not by the content of their character, but by the color of their skin.

Although Mikki Kendall very specifically targeted me by name for her Google-bombing campaign, which is the ultimate cause of my squabble with mazzie, instead of responding to me as an individual human being mazzie decided that I was a representative of "white feminists."

Mazzie herself appears to be white, but white SJWs seek to avoid being lumped into the automatic-white-racist category by appeasing SJW leaders, such as Mikki Kendall, thus receiving forgiveness for the original sin of being born a racist.

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Well it looks like JULIA & BUDDY will be produced twice in 2014. Time to get a web site up. I redid the poster/postcard to give it a less-slick look. I think this works much better - it looks like it was done with watercolors. Thanks to all the fancy hi-tech stylization features in Photoshop, of course. You can't see the textures though unless you click the image to see the full size version.

Plus new tag line - "A new play about love, dysfunction and other philosophical matters."

...Mr. Glaser, 84, with his imposing bald pate, goatee and wry professorial air, could easily be a character on the show, a seen-it-all Zen master from the creative department. “I could have walked in the door of that firm,” he said, of the fictional Sterling Cooper & Partners. “I knew those people.”Mr. Glaser still runs his small firm out of the Beaux-Arts townhouse he bought in 1965, the building where, three years later, he also helped found New York magazine with Clay Felker. The transom glass above the front door still bears the words “Art is Work,” and Mr. Glaser continues to live by the axiom. In recent years, the firm has been responsible for widely seen work, like the logo for the Brooklyn Brewery, covers for The Nation magazine and the logo and posters for Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America.”

Sunday, March 09, 2014

AΣTOΡIA is the Greek-letter version of ASTORIA. I normally don't notice a huge amount of Greek culture in Astoria in spite of its reputation, because there are so many other cultures vying for dominance. But I had always wondered why the Greeks in Astoria didn't seem to bother much with ancient Greek theater - and then I saw this poster in a window on 31st Street this weekend. It's great to have a phone with a functional camera again.

I might have to check out this show, which looks like a Mystery Play but for followers of Hellenism rather that Christianity. It's too bad you can't see the plays of Euripides, Aristophanes, etc. here though.

I was noticing a lot of Greek cultural artifacts during my walk around town today - the weather was a balmy 55 degrees - what a change of pace.

This building appeared to house a Greek cultural center that was so Greek their signs in the window were in Greek too.

I found this building pretty fascinating as well, on the same street. It appears to be a Greek architectural firm. Check out the columns and the traditional Greek border design known as the meander on the window balconies. That is a handsome building.

And then right around the corner from me is a well-known local Greek bakery Boulis famous for its Greek donuts known as loukoumades. Not nearly as handsome a building but more accessible.

Fun fact: there appears to be a hotel in Thessaloniki Greece called the Hotel Astoria. No explanation for the name though.

Someone else is behind the ring Beckett witnessed. Someone bigger. Future Forward is a political super PAC. The would-be murder victim from earlier, Evan Potter, did all the legal work to establish it for a wealthy client named Jason Cokeler, who just died of a heart attack. Millions was laundered through the super PAC. Someone is using the money to build a massive political war chest. Beckett knows that it’s Senator Bracken.

Bracken was responsible for Beckett's mother's death, which is what made her become a cop in the first place.

I have to say, I'm very impressed by this story line. I hadn't really thought too much about the money laundering facilitation of CU, but others (besides Castle's writers) have. Here is an amazing episode in the Stephen Colbert Super PAC saga. They literally use the term:

COLBERTI can take secret donations from my C-4 and give it to my supposedly transparent Super PAC

In addition to spending dark money directly, nonprofits can give unlimited donations to Super PACs for electioneering. Thus, although Super PACs are transparent, underlying donors can remain anonymous by simply routing their money through an intermediary nonprofit. Now, many—if not most—Super PACs operate with an affiliated nonprofit to give camera-shy donors a means to contribute large sums of money without public scrutiny. For instance, the Cooperative of American Physicians, a medical malpractice and medical liability insurer, has contributed $2.4 million to its own Super PAC for political ad buys—without any public knowledge of its underlying funders. [7] This practice has become so widespread that comedian Stephen Colbert has lampooned current law as essentially legalizing money laundering.[8]

...It is almost certain that Rand had Asperger’s Syndrome, a condition that has only come into greater awareness since the early 1990s...

...It is possible that neither author knew enough about Asperger’s to make the necessary connections, but there is abundant evidence for this proposition, particularly in Heller’s description of Rand’s childhood. It is perhaps just as well that neither author explicitly considers this possibility, because it would be all too easy to pathologise Rand, leading to a reductionist psycho-biography that would have done disservice to her ideas and influence.

Now I'm certainly opened to arguments against the notion that Rand had Asperger's, but I didn't get arguments last September when I first brought up the subject at Daylight Atheism - I got abuse. And Adam Lee was perfectly fine with this - which of course should have been a red flag to me then. An anonymous coward (although his true identity appears to be Alexander Weaver) who goes by the screen name Azkyroth, who rarely made any substantial contributions to the Atlas Shrugged conversation was the worst offender:

If you follow the "No, it doesn't" link you can see that Azkyroth's evidence for why I am wrong is a TV Tropes article that supports everything I said - the traits listed as indicative of Asperger's are very much like descriptions of Ayn Rand in the two biographies and two memoirs by her biggest sycophants, Nathaniel and Barbara Branden. None of these authors suggests that Rand had Asperger's but their reports of her behavior aligns very much with the descriptions.

But also, hypocritically, Lee never had a problem with anybody suggesting that Ayn Rand was a psychopath.

The idea that Rand was a psychopath is absurd - the reason that psychopaths are so scary is because they are masters of faking emotions they don't feel. If there was ever anybody who lacked the ability to fake, it was Ayn Rand.

I explained this to the people at Daylight Atheism, but it did no good. Instead Azykyroth claimed that my speculating that Ayn Rand had Asperger's was the equivalent of being a racist. I know that sounds absurd, but here is a screen shot of the comment:

And you can see the results - rather than refuting Azykroth's bogus comparison to racism, instead Adam Lee told me to STFU.

So it seems that as far as Adam Lee is concerned, the mere speculation that somebody that he and his friends don't like has Asperger's is the equivalent of racism.

Apparently all along Adam Lee was a Social Justice Warrior and I didn't realize it. Possibly because my understanding of SJW was that if you disagree with them about something you are accused of racism. But it seems that another method is to accuse somebody of "ablism" and then compare that to racism. So to disagree with a SJW you may be accused of racism, or alternately, one degree from racism.

Azykyroth wasn't content merely to suggest I was an "ablist" - that wasn't vicious enough:

Azkyroth's lie about me having an "obsessive need to demonize people with AS" was allowed to stand, but my defense of myself was deleted. And of course Azkyroth presents no evidence at all that I have ever harmed any living person by my speculations that Ayn Rand may have had Asperger's - but that isn't necessary. Social Justice Warriors don't have to provide evidence for any of their vicious attacks - they argue by assertion and evidence counts for nothing.

My assumption is that although I only know Azkyroth as an anonymous online coward, Adam Lee is a friend of this person in real life, and so feels compelled to side with him. But it's possible that Lee feels that the hypocritical prohibition against the topic of Ayn Rand and Asperger's is perfectly right and just without any personal considerations.

In any case, I saw no point in continuing to participate in a discussion run by Social Justice Warriors. Adam Lee has no shame about publicly siding with liars and unhinged defamers and feels no shame in censoring good-faith arguments on behalf of liars and unhinged defamers. But that's what Social Justice Warriors do.

Thursday, March 06, 2014

I got picked for the jury. For as many as two weeks of jury duty. I can say no more about the case.

I will say there is an amazing neighborhood near the courthouse. The courthouse itself is on an especially ugly section of Queens Boulevard where I had to trudge for 30 minutes before I found a restaurant that had an A rating.

And where I finally found an A restaurant (a bagel place) was on the outskirts of Forest Hills Gardens. Wow, what a mind-blowing cul-de-sac of quaintness in the middle of Queens. And it turns out it was entirely planned that way:

The area consists of a 142-acre (0.57 km2) development, fashioned after a traditional English village, that is one of America's oldest planned communities. It is modeled after the English planned garden suburb community Hampstead Garden Suburb, located near Golders Green, in London. The layout, with a central "square", and the similarity of many of the street names in both communities was clearly intentional. The community, founded in 1908, consists of about 800 homes, townhouses, and apartment buildings, mostly in Tudor, Brick Tudor or Georgian style, in a parklike setting designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., son of noted landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and partner in the Olmsted Brothers firm. Designed with transportation access in mind, the community's central square is adjacent to the Forest HillsLong Island Rail Road station. The largest apartment buildings stand closest to the station, while more distant buildings are smaller and have larger yards. Although most buildings are single-family homes, the development also includes garden apartment buildings and retail space. Today, the area contains the most expensive housing in the borough of Queens, and some of the most expensive in all of New York City.

I don't know about "traditional English village" - with that architecture and names of its private(!) streets like "Underwood Road" and "Seasongood Road" I thought I was in the Shire.

I didn't realize I was in a planned community until I came out the other end onto the Jackie Robinson Parkway and turned around to see the brick boundary markers proclaiming "Forest Hills Garden" and the WARNING! about entering private streets.

I actually began a blog post last May about some stupid shit that Dzodan said and ended up not publishing because Dzodan is so absurd. This was before I knew what a social justice warrior was, in spite of being one of their targets via Mikki Kendall's Tumblr.

But now that I see she is also a member of the Mikki Kendall Social Justice Warrior gang, I might as well post it.

And by the way - Kendall gang member Aaminah Khan complained in her article that Kendall's detractors are publishing critiques of Kendall "in online publications with huge readerships" but the only one I've found to date is The Nation article - and it's the only one the Kendall gang talks about. So where are all these other huge media outlets? Every other huge media outlet that mentions her that I've seen thus far is a virtual Kendall love fest. But if the Kendall gang wants to point me to actual critiques of Kendall outside of The Nation, I'd love to know about it.

If you study the "intellectual" output of Kendall long enough - and I have been since I found her smearing me by name in her karnythia Tumblr account in 2011 - you will realize that her main message, in the standard social justice warrior mode, is that white people suck and all carry the original sin of racism, regardless of what they, as individual human beings, say and do, and the only way they can be absolved of their original sin is to beg forgiveness of Kendall or one of her designated representatives.

Feminism will always be sacrificed in order to appease social justice warriors, because most prominent leaders of the feminist movement for the past 100 years have been white, and social justice warriors always judge people strictly by the color of their skin, rather than the content of their character.

That is what they really mean by "intersectionality."

Although really, Kendall doesn't just hate white feminists, she hates all white women, whom she likes to smear, en mass, in standard bigot fashion. This is a typical Kendall move:

First Lily Allen, now Peggy Noland: when it comes to objectifying black women, white women are having the best week ever.

What's that? You say you don't know who Lily Allen and Peggy Noland are? Well you better find out, if you're a white woman, because on your behalf they were having the best week ever of objectifying black women.

...how we would feel about food if the only thing on our plates, for the entirety of our lives and for the entirety of recorded history, had been spam with potatoes. The problem is not that we like penis, the problem is that in women’s metaphorical food plate of sexuality, penis has been the only available dish, the only dish it has been historically acceptable to eat at all.

And she is utterly wrong. Public displays of masculine beauty have in fact been severely restricted throughout most of recorded history and well into the 20th century.

Combine that with the prohibition against male homosexual desire and for most of the 20th century the artistic nude was always assumed to be female. Painter Paul Cadmus's work was often controversial because he broke the taboo against portraying men as objects of desire.

Dzodan's food metaphor is completely wrong because women didn't get the penis on the dish - women were on the dish. Only men had the luxury of engaging in sex for pleasure - for women it was a pleasure only if she somehow managed to beat the odds and marry a man she desired. Since the selection of her husband was most often based on her parents' preference and her own economic need, her own sexual desires were completely beside the point.

For women throughout recorded history sex was a full-time job. And like all jobs, your pleasure is beside the point. The point is getting paid.

So for women to express uninhibited desire to see a beautiful man's genitalia - even completely covered by cloth - is still quite new. Maybe if Flavia Dzodan wasn't so obsessed with beating down "neoliberal feminists" she would get that. Instead she writes this laughable bullshit:

When less than 100 years ago, women could be committed to psychiatric institutions and subjected to cruel medical practices for merely rejecting penis, for being “hysterical”, we are not exactly being revolutionary when we gaze at Jon Hamm’s penis. We are simply acknowledging the extent of patriarchy approved desire and, unintendedly, perpetuating said patriarchy by “choosing” to love penis rather than understanding how yes, we might love penis, but perhaps, we also love penis because it’s been sold to us as the only acceptable way to achieve orgasm.

Women weren't committed for "rejecting penis" but for rejecting the penis of the man who was paying for her room and board. If she wasn't going to give her husband sex, and given that divorce was incredibly hard or impossible to obtain, the easiest way to get rid of a woman who wasn't holding up her part of the economic arrangement that was traditional marriage was institutionalization.

Dzodan thinks it's likely that straight women like penis because it's been "sold" to us.
If sexual orientation was so easily manipulated through images there would be no gay men.

But it's pointless - Flavia Dzodan is just as uninterested in the actual socio-economics that drive human sexual practices as any postmodernist:

I’m sometimes amazed that phallocentrism (in the Derrida sense of the term) is not used to unpack patriarchy more often. It’s not just about penis, of course. It’s specifically about white, heteronormative, cis penis and that deserves more feminist critique I believe…

I hate you all Glosswitches, booblediboops, Laurie Pennys, Louise Penningtons, Julie Bindels, Megan Murphys, Michelle Goldbergs and your ilk. The B Classes of white feminism fighting tooth and nail for a place at the table. At our expense. With your writing commissions, the coins tossed in your direction by the men who own the media you so desperately want to be part of. And we pay the price of your success. You are not even good enough to be in charge. You pick the dirty cents that they drop and you will sell us all for the chance of picking the most no matter which ethics, which principles, whose lives you need to shit in the process. You also want your portion of media attention. You will soil anyone that gets on the way of your climbing. You have aspirations! The fact that now you are low level media whores edited by people who would gladly throw you into the lions if it meant they can pocket the change is irrelevant for you. We are the bootstraps you pull in the hopes of raising to the top. And raise to the top you will. The top of a vat of turds floating in your own media shit. No ethics, no qualms, no compassion, no humanity. I hate you all for that.

Contrary to popular belief, I do not hate Hugo Schwyzer, though. I feel deeply sad for him. Sad at the wasted potential of a man who obviously had the capacity to write and communicate and network and connect with people but became haunted by his own mental health issues and addictions...

So there you go. In spite of the ranting and raving and using Hugo Schwyzer as an excuse to blame all white women for everything bad in the world (see #solidarityisforwhitewomen) leading social justice warrior Flavia Dzodan doesn't hate him. She hates people who directly and legitimately oppose Mikki Kendall and her vicious tactics, instead.

Both Glosswitch and I have said it before, and who knows how many more times and how many more of us will need to say it again, but if your activism is focused on vicious, concerted efforts to silence women, you’re not doing feminism, you’re doing misogyny. And I promise you — I fucking guarantee you this — supporting bullies won’t protect you. It will not save you from being bullied yourself. Because some day you’ll step out of line and become the target yourself.

And guess who approved Dzodan's message? Of course you know who:

The author responds to Kendall's tweet:

(The author of this attack, for the record, is not someone I can recall having ever engaged with, nor have I written a single thing directly about her (it was brought to my attention, today, that I referenced an article of hers in a post I wrote back in 2012, though the post was not “about” her, per se, nor was it an attack on her, at all), despite the fact that some are defending this behaviour with more lies about how we “targeted” her, and she is simply responding to that. Never. Never have I “targeted” her or attacked her, spoken ill of her, or so much as addressed her on Twitter. My perspective on her work was that, while I may not agree with it, she was doing her thing and I was doing mine. No need to attack her or try to silence her. Saying “what did you think would happen” strikes me as a rather dishonest attempt to defend verbally abusive, misogynist behaviour à la “you had it coming.”)

Well of course you "had it coming" - you are a white woman in the public sphere, and therefore according to Mikki Kendall, Flavia Dzodan and all the other zany social justice warriors your job (unless you have praised Mikki Kendall and thus received her dispensation) is to STFU and take your abuse from your betters. Because privilege. And slavery.

My anti-racist bona fides

Although I was smeared on Tumblr by infamous bully Mikki Kendall and identitarian extremist K. Tempest Bradford (and thanks to the cozy relationship between Tumblr and Google, the smears show up in my search results), in fact I have a long history of opposing racism, and the evidence for the past 10 years is on this blog. Unhinged extremists like Kendall and Bradford don't care to know anything about the strangers they randomly smear. That's why they and the people who promote them like Verso books are horrible and don't help solve the problem of racism in the United States.